German-language rights to Lisa Robertson‘s first book, XEclogue, have been placed with German publisher Turia + Kant. Translator Marcus Coelen‘s rendition of Robertson’s feminist detournement of Virgil’s love poems will be issued in 2019.

John Armstrong, author of A Series of Dogs, will be reading at the first installment of a new local writer series in Chilliwack, this Monday, February 5, at Tractorgrease, 48710 Chilliwack Lake Rd.

Armstrong’s most recent book, A Series of Dogs(2016), is a memoir following all the tail-waggers that have featured in his various lifelong adventures (and even a few cats), and was a finalist for the 2016 Leacock Prize. His early life as Buck Cherry, leader of legendary punk rock band The Modernettes, as well as the following fifteen years as an award-winning journalist at the Vancouver Sun, inspired his first books with New Star, Guilty of Everything (2001) and Wages (2007).

See Armstrong read alongside local writers Margaret Bollerup, Heather Ramsay and Sylvia Taylor. Doors open at 6 p.m., show at 7. Admission is by donation.

Marie Annharte Baker will appear in the second annual Growing Room, a Feminist Literary Festival hosted by Room magazine. The festival runs from March 1-4 at various venues throughout Vancouver, featuring talks, readings and workshops on a range of topics that lie at the intersection of feminism and writing.

Annharte is an Anishinabe (Little Saskatchewan First Nation, Manitoba) poet who now lives in Winnipeg. She has been the author of several works, including Indigena Awry(2012) and Exercises in Lip Pointing(2003) from New Star Books, and AKA Inendagosekwe (2013) from CUE Books.

You can see Annharte at the following events:

INDIGENOUS BRILLIANCE

Friday, March 2 | 7:30 p.m. | Native Education College, 237 5th Ave E

THE WITCHES YOU DIDN’T BURN: Writing about Daughters, Mothers, and Grandmothers

George Stanley and George Bowering, co-authors of New Star’s forthcoming book Some End / West Broadway, will feature in the annual Galiano Literary Festival from 23-25 February this year. The festival has been around for nine years, and features talks, book signings, and writing workshops by some of the best Canadian authors, all on the beautiful Galiano Island. Both Stanley and Bowering have participated in the festival before, and the festival has hosted Bowering so many times that he is practically a regular feature.

The festival also published a featured author interview with George Bowering, conducted by Kris Krüg. As of now, you can still buy tickets to the festival here.

The pair’s latest work is a masterpiece of late style and friendship. Some End / West Broadway combines back-to-back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley. New Star Books will release the title on 14 February of this year.

The cover shows the two panels from Jack Shadbolt’s 1993 dyptich Encounter. It is reproduced courtesy of SFU Galleries, where the original painting is housed.

Sharon Thesen and Erin Moure will be in Vancouver to launch their newest books this Thursday, November 16, at the People’s Co-op Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Drive in Vancouver.

Montreal-based poet, translator and essayist Erin Moure lived in Vancouver for several years in the early 1980s, and her new prose work Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is her remembrance of that time, of her friend and lover “the little man”, of the trains where they both worked, and of neighbourhoods in — Montreal and Vancouver — where the recalled events took place.

Born and raised in Prince George, now established in Lake Country in the Okanagan, Sharon Thesen returns to Vancouver where she lived for some years to launch The Receiver, a book about what you can pick up by listening. The Receiver features the observant lyrical verse Thesen is known for alongside various kinds of prose, and culminates in a critical essay followed by a remarkable found poem both coming out of the poet’s work with Frances Boldereff.

Please join Sharon and Erin for brief readings, followed and preceeded by light refreshments. The launch gets underway at 7, and admission is free.

Anarchy Explained to My Father, by Francis Dupuis-DériandThomas Déri, introduces the reader to the basic concepts of anarchist thought, setting out the features which gives it such resonance today. Written in the form of a dialogue, Anarchy Explained to My Father is both a bracing and inspiring message as well as an up-to-date sourcebook on anarchism.

“This book should be read by anyone who wonders what anarchism is, what it can be, and how we work towards it.” — Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion and Rebel Life. “A brilliant exploration of a complex topic .. . a beautiful introduction to anarchy.” — Les Méconnus

Originally published in 2014 as L’Anarchie expliquée à mon père by Lux Editeur, Anarchy Explained to My Father is translated by John Gilmore.

Montreal-based poet/translator/critic Erin Moure‘s memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots is a working of mourning and memory. At its centre is an old friend, former lover, the remembrance of whom recreates long-ago worlds in Vancouver and Montreal. Watch for a cameo appearance by our current prime minister’s grandfather.

The Receiver is Sharon Thesen‘s first book since Oyama Pink Shale in 2011, and marks both a contination and a departure for the Prince-Georgeois, now Okanagan-based poet. Along with the wry lyrical work she is known for, The Receiver also encompasses autobiographical prose, sharp criticism, and found poetry that is both unsettling and hilarious.

Mr. Struthers takes advantage of a lay-over on Salt Spring Island on his return journey, with a lecture at Leaf Compassion, #105-109 McPhillips Avenue right in the heart of vibrant downtown Salt Spring. Seven-ish? Maybe later, d00d. If you do show up a little early, there’s Salt Spring Books right across the street, and they do have copies.

The Sacred Herb/The Devil’s Weed is an unfairly balanced look at all the whole marijuana hoo-ha. The author’s previous book, Around the World On Minimum Wage, an inner travelogue about his youthtime voyages to parts unknowable, will surely also be available for perusal.

We’re proud as punch to announce The Receiver, the first book from eminent BC poet Sharon Thesen in six years.

More formally various than Thesen’s previous books, The Receiver includes the short lyrics documenting the poet’s witnessing that readers of her work will recognize, as well as various kinds of found poems, translations, prose poems, alongside some brief essays or memoirs.

The Vancouver launch for The Receiver will be exactly two weeks later, on Thursday, November 16, at the People’s Co-op Bookstore on Commercial Drive, in conjunction with the Vancouver launch for Erin Moure’s new book Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots.

Thesen fans will have a choice of covers: the book (designed by Robin Mitchell Cranfield, whose last cover for New Star Books was The Weather by Lisa Robertson) comes in four colour schemes: peach, mauve, dark green, and light green.

This coming Mother’s Day will see the release of a long-simmering project here at New Star World HQ, one that’s hopped from burner to burner over the past 15 years and is now seasoned to perfection: The Big Note: A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa, by Charles Ulrich, will be available on May 13th. Based on hundreds of interviews, letters, and e-mail correspondences with scores of musicians, singers, engineers, artists, copyists, and others who worked with Zappa, The Big Note provides the liner notes that every album in the protean and prolific composer’s oeuvre cries out for. Featuring 100 albums recorded over 35 years and the 80+ players on them, with each one of 1,772 tracks described in detail, backed up by 1,424 citations, it is the indispensible resource for any FZ fan or scholar.

We are also delighted to announce a project that’s been in the works even longer, under the guise of several decades of friendship and poetic explorations: Some End / West Broadway by George Bowering / George Stanley is a two-sided double-covered “tumble book” (our second in a year!) featuring a short book of poems by each of the esteemed authors and long-time friends. Some End / West Broadway will be out on February 14. Learn about it in the Georges’ own words here.

And finally, the first day of summer is always an occasion to celebrate, but especially in 2018 when it coincides with if wants to be the same as is: Essential Poems of David Bromige (previously announced for Spring ’17). This large volume drawn from 22 books published during Bromige’s lifetime presents a life’s work that is, In the words of Bob Perelman, “beautiful, deeply amusing, continually surprising.”

Andrew Struthers is, according to the Vancouver Sun, “one of that select band of writers whose minds are bent enough to be interesting but not so bent as to be unintelligible” — i.e., he barely sticks out of the luscious green surf-battered wilds of Vancouver Island’s west coast. Struthers will be heading to his former home next week to read from his new double-sided book The Sacred Herb / The Devil’s Weed, which BC Bookworld called “a raucously British Columbian masterpiece.”